


Burning Snake

by apollothyme



Category: Marvel
Genre: Angst, M/M, Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-07
Updated: 2012-01-07
Packaged: 2017-10-29 03:55:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/315527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apollothyme/pseuds/apollothyme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He doesn’t hide it. Honestly, he doesn’t. He just doesn’t show it either. It’s not something pretty for others to look at. It’s something private that belongs to only him. Just like his memories are his, his brain and his body are his, his scars also belong to him and him only. Their rigged lines contrasting against his pale skin; some simple, some incredibly complex, all of them abuses and notes of a lost safety, all of them travelling to places where nothing should be able to reach.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Burning Snake

**Author's Note:**

> I also wrote [a creepy poem](http://jeremyfuckyourenner.tumblr.com/post/15411074053/whenever-i-start-writing-a-fic-i-write-a-poem-to) to go along with the fic.

He doesn’t hide it. Honestly, he doesn’t. He just doesn’t show it either. It’s not something pretty for others to look at. It’s something private that belongs to only him. Just like his memories are his, his brain and his body are his, his scars also belong to him and him only. Their rigged lines contrasting against his pale skin; some simple, some incredibly complex, all of them abuses and notes of a lost safety, all of them travelling to places where nothing should be able to reach.

Hiding most of them is easy: under clothes, hidden by armour and fake glamour smiles.  But there’s one he cannot hide with a piece of cloth or an easy lie ( _oh that? It’s from a skiing accident. Yes, I know, silly_ ). There’s one scar that is completely exposed for the whole world to see that he has to hide with makeup. It’s ugly and burned, it carries memories Tony only wishes to forget.

In the end it’s all about memories. They consume your mind and eat you alive, make you relive everything you wish you could forget. Memories are living things, and even though Tony is used to trying desperately to forget them, it is much harder to do so when the memories stare right back at him every time he looks in the mirror. Around his neck, a perfect circle of scarred skin, almost like a burning snake had wrapped around him, painfully squeezed and burned until Tony was nothing more than a pitiful babbling mess ( _please, please, I’ll do it just stop, please_ ).

But even then they didn’t stop, because it’s so much fun watching him cry in pain, it’s always so much fun to hurt the ones who can’t fight back. To recreate the pain you once felt into the weak, defenceless bodies of others.

None of that really matters though, yes Tony is scarred, so what? He’s good at hiding; he can just hide from his colleagues, from his friends, from everyone with a decent pair of eyes and pretend he’s the same as always. Cocky, abrasive, over-confident and proud of it baby. It’s easy, like slipping on another skin that fits him like a glove. Sometimes Tony even forgets his scars, if only for a little while. Well, a little while at first.

Because the thing is, the more time he spends with his new team, the easier it becomes to forget it all. Especially when he’s with Steve, they didn’t really get along in the beginning, but that quickly changed because Steve is  _nice_. He’s nice, he’s good, and he might be Captain America also known as perfection in human form, but beneath all that red, white and blue there’s a tiny kid from Brooklyn, and as weird as it might sound, Tony really likes the kid from Brooklyn.

And Steve likes him too, or at least he doesn’t mind Tony’s extremely chaotic behaviour which is more than good enough for Tony. They hang out constantly, just the two of them or maybe with the rest of the team and Tony finds himself enjoying each moment more and more. It’s a simple thing, just friends spending time together until it stops being simple and they stop being friends. It works a bit like an unspoken agreement that they are something more, but not really. At least that’s what it feels like for Tony.

It’s just that Steve seems to care so much more than anyone else, and Tony is not used to that at all. He’s not used to someone taking care of him, of someone checking up on his sleep schedule and making sure he’s eating properly not because they work for him, but because they care. Yeah, he has Rhodey and Pepper, but they’ve been there for too long and it’s not the same, not at all. So Tony isn’t used to this  _thing_  they have, whatever it might be, but that doesn’t mean he wants it to stop either because the feeling of Steve caring about him is nice and warm and calm and weird and was the word nice mentioned already? Because nice is the best word to describe it in Tony’s opinion, ‘nice’ is just a very good word.

The point is, Tony isn’t sure about what they have but he ignores that little detail in favour of not cocking it up. He acts like a proper boyfriend for the first time in a very long while and he thinks Steve is also trying to act like a proper boyfriend in his own way, and together they have a proper relationship except it’s one without the kissing and the touching and the whispering ‘I love you’ to each other in bed at night. But they do have ‘bed at night’ where they just lie there and talk after watching a movie in Tony’s flat screen, and then they fall asleep together and wake up alone.

Tony knows it’s all weird, bizarre even, and he knows the others think it’s weird too. But no one says a thing, probably because no one is sure on what to say, and that works rather well for Tony because when he’s with Steve he’s _okay_.

He forgets the ugly scars and forgets the memories, he forgets how messed up everything is in favour of reminiscing Steve’s ideals about the world, he doesn’t think about war and dreams of science fares instead. For a few simple moments the glove disappears, and he’s left feeling whole again.

And that’s was when everything fell apart for Tony. Because he forgets, and one day he doesn’t put on the stupid makeup Pepper had gotten him ( _because Pepper knows, of course she knows. She and Rhodey were there so they know but Tony doesn’t mind because they no longer bother to say anything_ ) and Steve finds out about the scar.

“Tony, Tony wake up.” Steve gently shakes Tony’s shoulder in order to awake the other man.

“What what, I’m – I’m awake, what’s going on?” Tony mumbles in a half-asleep daze as he starts reaching for his bedside table, thoughts of his armour and some extra strong coffee already filling his mind.

“No, it’s not that,” Steve says as he pulls Tony back into the bed. “Your neck, what’s that in your neck?”

Tony’s hand immediately flies to the scarred skin as his eyes snap open because  _shit_. He’d been so careful not to let Steve touch it or get too close, and just when things were looking like they were finally going to be decent for Tony, he had to go and forget the fucking makeup that covered the atrocity in his neck.

“It’s just a scar.” Tony replies; he closes his eyes and falls back into the bed with a small thump. Next to him Steve is still looking, his eyes completely fixated on the ugly mark on Tony’s skin, and Tony wishes he could somehow delete this moment from existence.

“It’s not just a scar, it goes all around your neck,” Steve’s finger carefully traces the pattern in Tony’s skin and it’s impossible to describe how much Tony wants to jerk free. He wants to scream, run away, ask Steve to please stop, but he would only be adding more fuel to the fire if he did as such. So instead he continues to lie there, with his eyes closed and his arms resting on top of his chest. “Where did you get it?” Steve finally asks.

Oh, and Steve should know that one already, he probably does and he’s just asking for the sake of asking. He’s just trying to be nice, inside he’s probably freaking out because he finally realized how ugly Tony truly is. But Steve wouldn’t think that, would he? He’s a soldier, he must have seen wounds way worse than Tony’s one.

Tony’s brain enters into conflict, the rational part tells him Steve won’t care, that the other man just cares about him and his safety because Steve isn’t some weak blonde who will freak out because of a silly scar, or a smart brunette, or any of the others that left in a hurry as soon as they touched Tony’s neck. But then there’s another part of him, the prideful, the always scared, the messed up part of him, which is screaming and raging inside Tony about how he just messed everything up.

“Afghanistan.” He says and that should be more than enough for Steve to make the rest of the calculations. They had never talked about Tony’s kidnapping, they had briefly covered it when Steve had asked him how he became Iron Man, but Tony did his best to sky over the torture part.

Quiet minutes pass by until Steve finally asks “How come I never saw it before?”

Tony does his best to shrug, but he thinks he fails miserably at it. He’s never been so self-conscious of his body before, and now every movement feels forced and stressed. “I covered it every day. I don’t want people looking at it.”

“You don’t want _me_ looking at it?” Steve asks and even though Tony can’t see his face he can practically hear the sorrow in his voice, and that’s just so not fucking fair. He should be the sad one here; he should be the crying rivers because he’s the ugly one who has to hide every single day of his life! An inexplicable anger fills Tony’s body, but it quickly disappears when he opens his eyes because Steve is looking as sad as Tony had imagined, maybe even a little worse.

“It’s just a scar, _my scar_.” They both sound like they’re on a soup opera and Tony hates it, he hates that he still keeps secrets from Steve, because Steve didn’t keep anything from him. He hates that he hurt Steve, and he hates that he got close to Steve to begin with because you can never hurt the ones you don’t get close to, and Tony knows he’s always going to mess things up.

And maybe Steve knows it too; maybe he knows how much Tony _hates_. How Tony practically hates life because life is unfair and nobody should be allowed to love it, he probably knows how Tony hates himself with all his guts because everyone with a brain should hate him but they don’t, and Tony doesn’t bother asking 'why' anymore. Yes, he knows, so he doesn’t say anything. Instead he lowers himself back on the bed, and turns Tony around so he can carefully tug Tony closer to him, until his chin is resting on Tony’s shoulder and they’re spooning, actually _spooning_. They’d never spooned before.

“You know I’m not going to run for the hills any moment now, right?” It’s a rhetorical question, or maybe it isn’t. Tony doesn’t it answer anyway. “I don’t care that you have scars. I don’t care that you’re a bit messed up, because I also know you’re a pretty awesome guy.” Tony had been the one teaching him the meaning of the word awesome, and now Steve loved to use it whenever he had the chance.

“I’m not going to leave you, Tony.”

Tony sighs because Steve can’t really promise that, nobody can promise that. But then Steve tightens his hold on Tony and he starts to slowly breathe into the back of Tony’s neck, and suddenly everything feels nice and warm and calm again.

“Okay.” Tony says, because Steve can’t promise that he’ll stay forever, but that doesn’t mean Tony has to push him away either.


End file.
